Following the publication of its first White Paper on Artificial Intelligence, Inria unveils a second document, this time on autonomous and connected vehicles, in which it identifies and highlights all the issues surrounding the major advances and innovations in this field. What are the technological and scientific challenges, the economic, social and environmental issues, and the legal and ethical implications? This White Paper is a reference text that evaluates, questions and looks ahead.

A European consortium led by Inria and funded by the EU ICT H2020 program, TeamPlay aims at developing new techniques that will allow execution time, energy, security and other important non-functional properties of parallel software to be treated as first-class citizens. As Project Coordinator Olivier Zendra points out, this research is expected to have a significant impact on various sectors of the industry. Results will be evaluated through use cases from various domains such as computer vision, cybersecurity, satellites and drones.

The start-up Hikob, created in 2011 at Inria, has been bought by TagMaster, the leading manufacturer of advanced RFID products and traffic sensors and of ANPR cameras for vehicle identification in traffic and rail solutions.

A security research team based at Inria center, in Rennes, Brittany, France, Tamis recently partnered with American networking hardware giant Cisco Systems in a move meant to design an innovative method for uncovering malware at code execution.

As a major player in Europe's research ecosystem, Inria considered important to clarify its expectations with regard to FP9, the future framework programme to succeed H2020. The institute has therefore forwarded its proposals to the European Commission "to provide food for thought during the active phase of drawing up the next framework programme for research and innovation
".

The CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) and Inria have awarded the 2017 "privacy protection" Prize to a European research team. During the 11th international conference Computers Privacy and Data Protection
(CPDP) to Seda GÜRSES, Carmela TRONCOSO and Claudia DIAZ for their article « Engineering privacy by design reloaded
».

The CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication) and Software Heritage have announced their collaboration beginning early 2018: it will enable the data repository in HAL to be extended to software and, as a result, contribute to the recognition of the work of research software developers.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

InriaSoft aims for the durable development of large-scale software programs by bringing together their user communities within consortia that will finance a team of engineers tasked with their maintenance and evolution. The InriaSoft headquarters are based in Rennes, as Claude Labit, director, and David Margery, technical director of this national action backed by the Fondation Inria, explain.

Networks, Algorithms and Probabilities

Leader : Philippe Robert

Research center(s) :
CRI de Paris

Field : Networks, Systems and Services, Distributed Computing

Theme : Networks and Telecommunications

Team presentation

The RAP project-team (Networks Algorithms and Probability)
investigates the design and the analysis of the algorithms in
communication networks. It has a strong collaboration with the research group of Orange Labs in Lannion led by F. Guillemin.
Since the data traffic is deeply statistical,
the probabilistic aspect of this studies is the major research theme of RAP. The
variability of the traffic and its impact on the design of the
architectures of networks and of the algorithms are a major issue in
the studies of the Internet.
The RAP project-team combines algorithmic analysis and
probabilistic studies to design simple and scalable algorithms in
communication networks.

Research themes

Design of Algorithms for Content Centric Networks.
RAP is contributing to the definition and evaluation of a new paradigm for the future Internet: a content-centric network (CCN) where, rather than interconnecting remote hosts like IP, the network directly manages the information objects that users publish, retrieve and exchange. We are building on existing CCN proposals, adopting as a starting point the concept currently promoted by Van Jacobson at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) (http://www.ccnx.org/).
Security concerns are addressed at the content level, relaxing requirements on hosts and the network. Users no longer need a universally known address, greatly facilitating management of mobility and intermittent connectivity. Content is supplied under receiver control, limiting scope for denial of service attacks and similar abuse. Since chunks are self-certifying, they can be freely replicated, facilitating caching and bringing significant bandwidth economies. CCN applies to both stored content and to content that is dynamically generated, as in a telephone conversation, for example. The project aims to complement the existing work on CCN with original proposals in the following three technical areas.

Traffic control must be completely rethought: TCP is no longer applicable and queue management will require new, name-based criteria to ensure fairness and to realize service differentiation.

Naming, routing and forwarding are partially addressed in the PARC proposal. However, choices are often expedients to facilitate overlay implementation. It is necessary to prove the name-based routing and forwarding is scalable and to design algorithms suitable for full-scale implementation.

CCN trades off expensive bandwidth for cheap memory as content chunks can be cached within the network, avoiding the need to repeatedly fetch copies of popular items. It largely remains to define replication and caching strategies and to evaluate their performance.

Study of Large Stochastic Networks
As the complexity of communication networks increases (and, consequently, the algorithms regulating them), the classical mathematical methods used to estimate the stationary behavior, the transient behavior show more and more their limitations. For a one/two-dimensional Markov process describing the evolution of some network, it is sometimes possible to write down the equilibrium equations and to solve them. When the number of nodes is more than 3, this kind of approach is not, in general, possible. The key idea to overcome these difficulties is to consider limiting procedures for the system:
by considering the asymptotic behavior of the probability of some events like it is done for large deviations at a logarithmic scale or for heavy tailed distributions, or looking at Poisson approximations to describe a sequence of events associated to them.
by taking some parameter of the model and look at the behavior of the system when it approaches some critical value. In some cases, even if the model is complicated, its behavior simplifies in the neighborhood of the critical parameter: some of the nodes grow according to some classical limit theorem and the rest of the nodes reach some equilibrium which can be described.
by changing the time scale and the space scale with a common normalizing factor N and let N goes to infinity.
The list of possible renormalization procedures is, of course, not exhaustive. But for the last ten years, this methodology has become more and more developed. Its advantages lies in its flexibility to various situations and also to the interesting theoretical problems it has raised since then.

International and industrial relations

ANR Project ``CONNECT: Content-Oriented Networking: a New Experience for Content Transfer''. The proposal submitted to the VERSO programme has been accepted. The planned starting date is January 2011 and the project is scheduled to last 2 years. The lead partner is Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs France and the other partners are RAP, INRIA/PLANETE, Orange LAbs, TelecomParisTech, UPMC.